Track Listing

Disc 1:

1. Overture
2. Heaven On Their Minds
3. What's The Buzz/Strange Thing Mystifying
4. Everything's Alright
5. This Jesus Must Die
6. Hosanna
7. Simon Zealotes/Poor Jerusalem
8. Pilate's Dream
9. Temple, The
10. Everything's Alright [30 seconds long]
11. I Don't Know How To Love Him
12. Damned For All Time/Blood Money

Disc 2:

1. Last Supper, The
2. Gethsemane(I Only Want To Say)
3. Arrest, The
4. Peter's Denial
5. Pilate And Christ
6. King Herod's Song(Try It And See)
7. Judas' Death
8. Trial Before Pilate(Including 39 Lashes)
9. Superstar
10. Crucifixion
11. John Nineteen Forty-One

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1051 in Music
• Released on: 1996-09-24
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: Cast Recording, Original recording remastered

Amazon.com essential recording
It may not have been the first rock opera (the Who's Tommy was released in 1969), but Jesus Christ Superstar was a legendary album long before it hit the stage, thanks to Tim Rice's compelling book and lyrics combined with Andrew Lloyd Webber's irresistible music. Telling the story of the last days of Christ from the point of view of Judas (Murray Head), the still-unmatched original cast also stars Deep Purple's Ian Gillan as Jesus and Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene, the role she made into a career (with a cameo on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack). Decades later, such songs as "Superstar," "I Don't Know How to Love Him," "Heaven on Their Minds," and "Everything's Alright" still retain their extraordinary power. --David Horiuchi

Customer Reviews

A Simply Superlative Recording
A shatteringly powerful audio recording, simply my favorite CD of all time. I listen to this at least once a year around Easter, and it never fails to move me. Ian Gillan, Murray Head and Yvonne Elliman are superb--telling the greatest story of all time with some of the most powerful music ever written and sung.

I'd give it 10 stars if I could.

Buying it again
This album is part of my first coherent memory - hearing it broadcast on long-gone San Francisco station KKHI. I have owned it on Ampex reel-to-reel, LP, cassette and now CD. I still think this is the best thing Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice ever did, but maybe my early exposure to it made me biased. Ian Gillan's Jesus and Murray Head's Judas play off one another in most excellent fashion, while the incomparable Yvonne Elliman owns every song she sings. Beats the movie all hollow by my reckoning.

Simply a great piece of music
I first heard this shortly after it was first released in 1970, back when I was 7 years old, and it made a major impact on my life. I am now a music teacher with a Ph.D. in musicology, and I'm happy to say that this music still packs the same emotional punch it did 40 years ago. The recording is, IMO, much more emotionally resonant than the film soundtrack, partiularly due to the raw sound of the great backing band. The direct and simple recording of the band and vocals leaves the music free of dated technological artifacts (how much worse it could have sounded if had been produced in the '80s!). The music is also amazingly free of all the timeworn cliches that haunt (and for me, ruin) Andrew Lloyd Weber's later efforts. The original LPs sounded richer and punchier than the CD transfer, of course, but that's a small complaint. For those of you enjoy emotionally charged and dramatic music, this is one you'll want to become familiar with.